This is a review I wrote of the book Knowing Christ Today, by Dallas Willard, that was published last year in Areopagus Journal. I'm a big fan of Willard's work and think that every believer, if she is able, ought to read something of his at some point. He has been very influential on the way I conceive of the spiritual life, the kingdom of God, and what it means to be a disciple. I hope this review encourages some people to check out this book and some of his others (like The Divine Conspiracy or The Great Omission).

------Knowing Christ Today, by Dallas Willard

Western Christians find themselves in
increasingly pluralistic societies. It is now the case, and has been for some
time, that the average person will probably not be familiar with the Bible’s
basic narrative, nor will they necessarily treat the Bible’s contents as
authoritative or true. Religious beliefs are now widely understood as
preferences or cultural heritage markers rather than claims to knowledge about
the nature of reality. Because of this, and because of various trends within
church culture towards unclear or incomplete presentations of what exactly it
means to follow Jesus, it is vital that the people of God know what they
believe and why – in other words, what it truly means to “know Christ and the
power of His resurrection” (Phil. 3:10).

Knowing
Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (HarperOne, 2009) is Dallas Willard’s
articulation of the place of knowledge in the Christian life. The central thesis of his book is that
Christianity represents a very real body of (spiritual) knowledge that is
accessible to anyone willing to seek it. In Willard’s own words: “We want to
try to help readers with problems that arise in the modern world from the very
idea of there being knowledge of God, and especially those problems that arise
out of the context of contemporary education and professional life” (217,
endnote 15).

Willard begins by addressing
the relationship of faith and knowledge.
He first defines knowledge in terms of epistemological realism – “we
have knowledge of something when we are representing it (thinking about it,
speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of
thought and experience” (15) – and then traces, in broad strokes, the shifts in
culture by which “the status of ‘knowledge’ came to be reserved, as a matter of
definition, to the subject matters of mathematics and the ‘natural’ sciences –
and, questionably, to that of the ‘social’ or ‘human’ sciences as well” (23).
It is here that Willard makes one of his most important and foundational
observations:

An act of faith in the biblical tradition
is always undertaken in an environment of knowledge and is inseparable from it. We can never understand the life of
faith seen in scripture and in serious Christian living unless we drop the idea
of faith as a “blind leap” and understand that faith is commitment to action,
often beyond our natural abilities, based
upon knowledge of God and God’s ways (20).

In
the next two chapters he makes a twofold case. First, he demonstrates that
knowledge is always operable at the practical level because all persons hold,
consciously or subconsciously, some worldview, and all worldviews contain
express or implied knowledge claims. He shows that the biblical answers to the
most fundamental worldview questions are compelling and can still be seen at
work in society, even in places and philosophies where a biblical worldview is
explicitly rejected.

Next, he goes into greater
detail about exactly why and how Christian teaching came to be considered something
other than knowledge. He suggests that this happened not on the basis of the falsification of such teaching but
rather on the obscuring of it, and
this is something for which the church herself is partially culpable. (One
consequence of the scope and purpose of this book is that he is unable to
relate more than a brief and abbreviated account of this; his endnotes are
crucial both for further reading and for establishing his trustworthiness as a
guide.

In chapter four, Willard
begins the first part of his case for the existence of spiritual knowledge by
articulating a form of the cosmological argument. He acknowledges that this
argument does not bring us to the God of Scripture, but instead believes that
it “shows conclusively that there is
something more than the physical or ‘natural’ universe, something of very
impressive proportions” (109). Chapter five continues this line of thought
by dealing with the possibility of miracles, which culminates in a discussion
of Christ’s resurrection. (Willard’s endnotes are, again, invaluable for
further study.)

The final three chapters find
Willard applying some of his conclusions concerning spiritual knowledge to
three spheres: an individual’s daily spiritual life (chapter six), the question
of religious pluralism (chapter seven), and the pastor’s vocation and calling
(chapter eight). It is in these chapters that Willard’s theological acumen
shines, and he repeats and elaborates on themes – centered on the present
availability of the kingdom of God in Christ – that can be traced back to his
book The Divine Conspiracy, first
published in 1998. Willard makes the important point that knowledge by
acquaintance and knowledge by description are two different things, and so this
knowledge of Christ must be acted on: “To know Christ in the modern world is to
know him in your world now. To know him in your world now is to live interactively with him right where
you are in your daily activities” (140).

The
book ends with a clarion call for local church pastors to consider themselves
“teachers of the nations,” those who have access to knowledge that humanity
desperately needs. It is a resounding and challenging note on which to end:

It
is not enough that pastors identify what the right doctrines are and that they
believe them or are committed to them. They must know them to be true and must
be living according to the realities they represent. They must have firsthand knowledge
(“acquaintance”) with the existence of God, the resurrected life of Christ, and
the reality and power of love, good and evil, the truth, and the Word of God. They
must experience Jesus Christ being “with them always, to the end of the age”
(Matt. 28:20) and must be aware of the effects of that…Only upon a solid basis
of knowledge can spokespeople for Christ have the confidence in what they are
saying and doing that allows them to be calm, clear, and courageous facing
today’s world (200-201).

The
part of this book most open to criticism, I think, is chapter four, in which
Willard relates a version of the cosmological argument. There simply is not
enough space for Willard to deal satisfactorily with the treatment such an argument
has historically received. Furthermore, while Willard uses it to initiate a
chain of reasoning that culminates with Christ’s resurrection, I would have
reversed the order. That is, for Willard, it is necessary to first “set the
scene” by demonstrating that we live in a world in which miracles – of which
the resurrection is the most crucial – are very much possible; I would have begun with the historical evidence for
the resurrection, because this, in my opinion, opens the door to seeing reality
a certain way: as a reality in which God acted in Christ and so is knowable. Those
down through the ages who have defended various cosmological arguments are
simply further general testimony to what Jesus claimed to reveal specifically.
But this is more a question of priority than accuracy or efficacy.

Overall
Willard’s book is an important and thoughtful contribution to evangelical
practical theology. In an age of increasing religious pluralism, believers need
to be able to gently, compassionately, and clearly articulate the distinctive
contributions of Christianity to the fundamental worldview questions operable
in every religion and philosophy. For Willard, that contribution is summed up
as a knowable and unique body of
knowledge about reality, which finds its highest expression in the daily
spiritual life in Christ and is – perhaps most importantly – fundamentally available to any who would seek it.